Errors with be, whether whether whether whether whether whether whether whether omission omission omission omission omission omission omission omission (e.g., John happy) or overuse (i.e., be-insertion; e.g., John is love Mary), have received particular attention in L2 acquisition studies exploring L1 transfer. This study investigates such errors in the context of L3 acquisition, focusing on L1 transfer. L1-Chinese (n = 34) and L1-Russian (n = 34) children with L2 Korean completed an elicitation production task designed to explore their use of English be. The study resulted in two main findings. First, L1-Russian children showed more omission errors than proficiency-matching L1-Chinese children, possibly due to an L1 transfer given that copula in Russian are dropped in the present tense. Second, L1-Chinese learners used be-insertion more frequently than proficiency-matching L1-Russian children, possibly due to using be for more functions (as a topic marker and an inflectional morpheme), as other research has shown for L2-English learners with topic-prominent L1s. Based on the findings, the study discusses some pedagogical implications.

Spontaneous motion is one of the most basic event types, but different languages use varying patterns to express it. For example, English usually encodes path information in prepositional phrases or adverbial particles, while Korean maps path information onto verbs (Talmy, 1985). This study predicts that this typological difference would affect English spontaneous motion expressions produced by Korean learners and analyzes two English-language speech corpora, one, the data from native speakers (600 recordings), and the other, data from L1-Korean learners of English (400 recordings). It finds that the learners significantly underuse satellite-framed patterns, but not verb-framed patterns, compared with the native speakers, suggesting that the L1 plays a role in their L2 production. The satellite-framed patterns, however, account for the greatest portion of spontaneous motion expressions in the L2 corpus, suggesting the dominant effect of input on L2 production. These findings lead to pedagogical implications concerning preventing L1 interference and fostering input-based L2 acquisition.

This paper explores the English needs of culinary college students in Korea, asking whether their English needs differ by their desired careers. To this end, we administered a survey to 123 culinary college students and divided them into six groups based on their desired careers. The results show that the type of desired career of the participants is highly correlated with their perceived need for learning English, the kind of English skills that they want to learn, and the level of English proficiency that they hope to achieve. For example, students planning to work for a restaurant or hotel abroad had the highest English proficiency needs whereas those planning to study in graduate school in Korea and those planning to work for a restaurant or hotel in Korea had relatively lower needs. The results suggest that college English programs need to provide diverse college English courses to prepare students for their diverse future careers.

This paper explores who needs what aspects of L2 English to what levels of proficiency, focusing on college English curriculum development in Korea. A survey was conducted of 532 college students in Seoul. Grounded that career is one of the most important motives for EFL learning, the participants were divided into seven groups based on their desired careers. The results show that the types of desired careers of the participants are highly correlative with the strength and weakness of their need for learning English, the kinds of English skills they want to learn, and the levels of English proficiency they hope to achieve.

This study explores the morpho-syntactic properties of the ‘overgenerated be’ that appears between a subject and a thematic verb (e.g., she is go home) produced by Korean-speaking English learners, and discusses how the overgenerated be reflects L2 inflection development. I argue that the overgenerated be initially functions as a topic marker, but then develops into a verbal inflection. A total of 377 writings of 23 first-year Korean middle school students were examined for the study. The students were divided into three groups based on their English proficiency. The overgenerated be was found mostly in the two lowest proficiency groups: the lowest proficiency group used the overgenerated be as a topic marker, while the medium proficiency group used the ‘overgenerated be’ as a verbal inflection to mark tense.